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Drones can safely fly a human kidney without damaging it, study shows

Joseph Scalea

Provided that retailers like Amazon get their way, it won’t be long before drones are delivering everything from books and Blu-rays to takeout meals and clothing. Could they prove useful for delivering transplant organs as well?

It’s a great idea in theory: Being able to avoid traffic jams and other road-based delays is much more important when you’re transporting a potentially life-saving organ to someone waiting in hospital. But exactly how practical this solution is has been subject to questioning. Perhaps until now, that is. In a new piece of research, investigators from the University of Maryland put a kidney in a cooler and flew it on test flights underneath a DJI M600 Pro drone. To find out exactly what happened during the course of the journey, they developed a dedicated organ-monitoring wireless biosensor to measure temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, vibration, and GPS position.

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“As someone who deals with the time-sensitive nature of transplantable human organs on a daily basis, I remain frustrated that my patients’ ability to get a lifesaving organ is somehow contingent on commercial airline schedules,” Dr. Joseph Scalea of the University of Maryland Medical Center, told Digital Trends. “I do not accept this. I have always thought we could do better. Beyond ill-timed flights, eliminating the need for a human to accompany an organ limits exposure and risk for invaluable transplant nurses, technologists, and doctors on the recovery teams. So I teamed up with the incredibly smart people at the University of Maryland College Park and at the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) test site to begin asking tough questions about drone-based organ transportation.”

Joseph Scalea

The good news coming out of the study is that the kidney remained stable during flight — and actually experienced fewer vibrations than when being transported in a fixed wing plane. Analysis after the flight revealed no damage had taken place either. Needless to say, that’s pretty important when it comes to transplant organs.

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“The next step is learning more about barriers to entry, trying to identify the appropriate strategic partners, and trying to overcome additional technical hurdles,” Scalea continued. “For example, I envision that drones will need to fly safely, much faster than they are currently able. Further, flights need to be autonomous in order for drone transportation to be sustainable. I think that identifying partners interested in helping us reach this goal is important. I also think that we need to address the transplant community appropriately. It is critical to our team that we not lose the trust of the people we serve — our patients, our donors, and their families.”

The research was recently published in the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
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